Congressional Democrats have again demanded urgent reforms to the country’s immigration court system after The Washington Post revealed a veteran judge’s allegations that she was ordered to reverse rulings and urged to conduct sham bond hearings.
Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Dick Durbin of Illinois, both longtime critics of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, renewed calls this week to pass a bill that would remove immigration judges from the authority of the executive branch.
They spoke out in response to the story of Karen Donoso Stevens, a former Homeland Security prosecutor who joined the bench in 2016. After persistent interference by Justice Department officials, Donoso Stevens alleged, she was pulled from court mid-hearing, demoted and eventually fired.
Her accusations contradict repeated assertions by the Trump administration that — as required by law — immigration judges serve as independent arbiters of justice.
“Unfortunately, this Administration has shown time and time again that they have no regard for our Constitution or the rule of law — as we’ve seen in the case of Karen Donoso Stevens,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “This abuse of power must be stopped.”
Unlike federal judges who are protected from political retaliation by lifetime tenures and the constitutional separation of powers, immigration judges work for the executive branch. Since Trump retook office, his administration has dismissed more than 100 of the nation’s approximately 700 immigration judges and replaced many with what officials call “deportation judges.”
“Judges who decline to follow precedent undermine the integrity of the system and potentially engage in professional misconduct,” Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, said in a statement. “EOIR cannot tolerate judges who decline to follow the law in lieu of their own personal preferences.”
Mattingly — who provided no evidence that Donoso Stevens or any other judge fired without cause had declined to follow the law — also alleged that The Post’s investigation “contains several misleading statements or misrepresentations,” but she did not name any.
Every year, Donoso Stevens, 53, had denied asylum in more than half the applications that came before her, a record consistently in line with national averages.
“I stand with Judge Donoso Stevens and the many others like her … who have been fired for simply doing their jobs,” said Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We urgently need an independent immigration court to prevent these abuses from ever happening again.”
Durbin and Van Hollen have joined other Democrats, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, to push a bill that would afford the court true independence. Without Republican support, though, the legislation has little chance of passage.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court strengthened the president’s control over immigration courts, clearing the way for his administration to restrict a policy that had allowed judges to close thousands of deportation cases each year.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who respectively chair the Senate and House judiciary committees, did not respond to requests for comment about whether they found Donoso Stevens’s allegations troubling or would call for an investigation.
“All illegal aliens receive full due process and have their claims heard,” Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “No lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens. Once again, Democrats are running to the defense of illegal aliens and continue to ignore the victims of illegal alien crime.”
The Trump administration, Donoso Stevens told The Post, first violated her judicial independence in September 2025.
For decades, undocumented immigrants who weren’t apprehended until after they entered the country were allowed to request bond, leaving judges to decide whether it was safe to release them as their cases proceeded. But the Board of Immigration Appeals, stocked with members appointed under Trump, suddenly decided that anyone who came unlawfully should remain jailed, even those with clean records and family ties.
The opinion, Donoso Stevens and other judges discovered, failed to account for children who came to the United States without a parent or guardian and had since reached adulthood, a group that, in their view, fell under distinct legal guidelines. She granted bond in four such cases.
On Sept. 17, Eric Dillow, her supervisor at the Annandale Immigration Court, called. He wanted to discuss bond, “a hot topic,” according to her notes.
Dillow, who did not reply to a request for comment, emailed her a separate ruling that, he believed, meant she could have denied bond. Donoso Stevens told him she could see the merits of the argument, but she said Homeland Security should either file a motion asking her to reconsider or request that the appellate board intervene. He agreed, according to her notes, but called back a few minutes later.
“He said higher-ups said I had to vacate my decs sua sponte,” Donoso Stevens wrote in a note that abbreviated “decisions” and used a Latin phrase that refers to judges reversing their own rulings unprompted.
Dillow did not name the “higher-ups,” so Donoso Stevens pressed for an explanation: “Why can’t DHS file a motion to reconsider?”
“Oh no,” he replied. “They’re not going to do that.”
To Donoso Stevens, Dillow had not only told her how to rule, directly violating the executive office’s vow of judicial independence, he’d implied that Homeland Security had ordered the court system to acquiesce.
“Immigration judges — like almost all judges in the American judicial system — are required to follow precedent,” Mattingly wrote in her statement. “As the quotes from only Democratic lawmakers demonstrate, only the most tendentious and partisan advocates would view that requirement as ‘being told how to rule,’ and no serious lawyer views it as infringing a judge’s decisional independence.”
The Post described the allegation to three legal experts, and all of them condemned it as an unacceptable infringement of a judge’s decisional independence.
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